Check iPhone and Android Visitors Using Google Analytics

When I was new in my previous agency, I was tasked to launch an e-mail campaign by a high profile tourism agency. One of the things I do is to test how the e-mail appears among different e-mail clients. Not only that, we have to check how e-mail appearance looks like in different web browsers. For example, I would check how the message appears in Yahoo! in Netscape 5.0. Needless to say, it was a tedious job. Good thing there are tools that simulate browsers and e-mail client versions at one go.

This time, we have other things to monitor when we manage our websites using web analytics tools. Luckily for us, Google Analytics is a proactive application that releases new features while allowing a certain degree of flexibility (such as defining search engines within our website profiles).

There is no doubt, more users are now using their phones to access the web. We ask ourselves, can our website support iPhone or Android users? BeansBox is the only company website in Hong Kong that proudly shows it’s ready for viewing by iPhone users. Are our websites often accessed by mobile phone users that we need to think of revamping/tweaking the site to cater to mobile users? Well, first we need to find out how many visitors come to our site.

Now, let’s setup a custom segment that will record visitors coming from iPhone and Android. Log on to your Google Analytics reports. On the upper right portion shows Advanced Segments. Click on it to expand and click on “Create a new advanced segment”. From the “Dimensions” menu on the left, select “System > Operating System” and drag it on the broken line on the right. Once you’re done, a condition statement appears as “Matches exactly” and “Value” appears on its right. Enter “iPhone”. You are done with iPhone. Repeat the same process for “Android” by clicking on the “And ‘or’ Statement”.

You should now have settings appearing similar to the following image.

Give this segment a meaningful name and return to the reports dashboard. Click the “Advanced Segments” on the upper right again. Unselect the “All Visits” on the left and check the new custom segment you created. All the data appearing in Google Analytics should reflect your visitors who are using mobile devices. If you see a flat line, nobody has bumped across your website among mobile users yet.

Otherwise, by accessing “Visitors > Browser Capabilities > Operating Systems” you will see how many of your visitors are iPhone or Android users.

Now you can decide whether it is worth investing to develop an mobile device ready website.